Former President Trump’s campaign team has backed away from his promise to “automatically” grant green cards to immigrants who graduate from college.
“President Trump has vowed to close the border and begin the largest mass deportation of illegal immigrants in history on day one of his administration,” Carolyn Leavitt, national spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement last week. New York Post reportThe former president noted that he would implement an “aggressive vetting process” to “weed out all communists, Islamic extremists, Hamas supporters, America-haters and public servants.”
Trump’s comments came after an appearance on the “All In” podcast last week, where he outlined a plan to give every foreign college graduate a green card along with their diploma.
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Former President Trump (Shawn Rayford/Getty Images/File)
“I believe that if you graduate from college, you should automatically get a green card as part of your diploma and be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior college,” Trump said during his speech.
The proposal received immediate backlash, with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, telling the New York Post that such grants were an “absurd proposal” and would lead to a “drain of foreign cash” by “stapling green cards to the diplomas” of US college graduates.
“When someone gets a PhD in science from a university, I personally drive them to their house and hand them a green card,” Krikorian said. “The problem is that foreign university graduates with fake two-year master’s degrees or gender studies degrees can’t apply for green cards. [major]you can get a green card.”
Chris Chmielenski, executive director of the conservative Immigration Responsibility Project, echoed those criticisms, arguing that such a plan would “lower wages for all Americans, increase job competition especially for new college graduates, and pose a threat to national security.”
Conservative critics slammed Trump’s proposal. (Donald Trump 2024 Campaign/File)
FBI Director Wray warned about the terrorism threat posed by open borders just days before the arrests of eight ISIS suspects across the US.
“America’s immigration policy must serve the interests of all Americans, not the interests of elite business leaders seeking cheap labor,” he said.
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign also criticized the remarks, telling Fox News Digital that Biden’s proposals were “empty promises” to “countless people who have been permanently hurt by his first term.”
“Since taking office, Donald Trump has made it his mission to rip apart immigrant families for his own political gain every chance he got,” campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said. “Not only has he openly repeated Nazi rhetoric about immigration, but he is proudly aiming to go even further in his second term by promising brutal policies like rounding up immigrants and placing them in mass detention camps.”
President Biden (Anna Moneymaker/Files)
But Leavitt sought to clarify the president’s remarks in a statement, noting that such a program would “only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates, whose jobs will never fall short of American wages or American workers.”
“He believes that only after such vetting has taken place should we retain the most outstanding graduates who can make a significant contribution to America,” Leavitt said. “And this only applies to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who will never earn less than American wages or workers.”
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The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
